Hey there! Glad you could make it! Wonderful to see you. It looks as though you've got your coffee mug out and ready for a fill up so go ahead...and nudge a virtual treat or two unto your plate, too, why don't'cha. Ready to continue on our world tour? Today we're going to hear about Albert who has spent 50 years on his world tour. All aboard!
Calling Albert Podell ‘well travelled’ would be an understatement.
78-year-old Podell, a former Playboy editor, can truly say that he’s seen it
all, after spending half a century visiting every country in the world. He’s
encountered pretty much everything on his travels, right from guerillas in
Yemen, to flying-crab attacks in Algeria, and police interrogations in Cuba. He
has chased water buffaloes, broken his bones, and eaten all kinds of weird
stuff. He’s been robbed, arrested, and almost lynched!
Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very young age. “Aged six, I
started to collect postage stamps, and where the other kids specialised in
certain countries, I wanted a stamp from every country in the world,”. “Getting a passport stamp from every one may have been inspired by
that.”
“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper also instilled in me a
fascination with travel because I wanted to see the lands where all the
objects, people, and places depicted on those stamps came from.” So he resolved
early on that “there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”
As a young man, Podell took off on the next adventure whenever he got
time off work. At age 28, he led an expedition around the world, setting the
record for the longest automobile journey ever made around the earth. But as he
grew older, he realized that he wasn’t satisfied with travelling in bits and
pieces.
“As I moved past middle age, I still wanted to do one grand and glorious
travel venture, to go out with a bang rather than a whimper, and, after I
realized that I had been to 90 nations, I decided that I just might be able to
visit every one of the 196 countries during my allotted years,” he said.
Travelling has not exactly been smooth-sailing all the time, but Podell
has enjoyed every second of it. With an accommodation budget of about $10 per
night, he has spent several nights in his sleeping bag, “at border posts,
roadsides, jungles, glaciers, airport floors, and in hostels, tents, trailers,
trees, teepees, campers, cars, caravansaries, desert dugouts, and flea-bag
motels alternately sweating and freezing; dodging dengue-fever mosquitoes by
day and malarial ones by night.”
He’s also been through some truly terrifying moments, like the time when
he was unable to provide proof of not being Jewish to the Egyptian government,
or the time he was unable to prove that he was not CIA to the Cuban secret
police. He was also thrown in jail in Baghdad, when a conman pretended that
Podell had hit him with a car. Some of his hair-raising moments include being
stranded on Kiribati, robbed in Algiers and the Khyber Pass, nearly lynched in
East Pakistan where he was mistaken for an Indian spy, and almost drowned in
Costa Rica.
Understandably, he’s eaten some odd food during the course of his
travels. “Among the most memorable was an anteater Steve (his friend) and I
found recently run over on a road in Panama,” Podell said. “Not wanting to
waste a good source of protein, we chopped it up, added salt and pepper, wished
we had a box of Roadkill Helper, roasted it over a campfire, and it tasted…
awful, like a burger marinated in formic acid.”
Rats, he says, are unexpectedly tasty, “especially the big boys eaten in
Africa, where they’re called ‘grass cutters’. The locals skin the rodents,
split them down the middle, spread them out flat, and roast or grill them. Each
tastes exactly like what it ate. If it lived in a cane field, it tastes like
sugar.”
“Unfortunately, the elephant dung beetle I ate in Kenya smelled exactly
like what it ate, but I overcame this olfactory impediment with a liberal
application of insect repellent under my nose,” he joked.
Some of the other strange foods he’s eaten include iguana in Central
America, fish lips and organ meats boiled in blood in China, possum pie in the
Caribbean, and crocodile in Australia. “I’ll eat almost anything except
endangered species,” he told National Geographic News. “I ate the brain of a
live monkey in Hong Kong. I ate old camel meat, which just slithers around in
your mouth and coats it with grease.”
He’s been on some offbeat modes of transport as well – ancient
airplanes, overloaded ferries, broken-down bush taxis, pole-pushed canoes,
cotton trucks, camels, donkeys, rickshaws, tuk-tuks and more. “In short, almost
anything that transports people, except an ambulance, thank God,” he joked.
Podell has strict criteria as to what counts as a ‘country’ while
travelling. He obviously doesn’t cheat by counting places where he’s changed
planes. According to his standards, for a country to be considered ‘visited’
three requirements have to be met: “It has to be a recognized country at the
time you go there,” “You must have a visa or enter legitimately,” and, “You
must get a passport stamp.”
He also has a few flexible rules: “You should at least go to the
capital, stay at least 24 hours, and if possible cross the country in one
direction.”
Over the years, he has also developed a unique system for rating
countries, called the PPPR (the Podell Potty Paper Rating System). “You can
spend hours looking at these studies that are issued by the World Bank and the
IMF. But I found the surest way to know where a country ranks economically and
socially is to go to a public bathroom and check the toilet paper,” he said.
“I have seven rankings, starting with the best, which is soft white.
From soft white it goes down to hard white; hard brown; purple, green, and
other colours; to torn-up newspaper; to no paper at all, just a little bucket of
water. The lowest ranking, which is a seven, is when there are no public
toilets. The only place I have tentatively given a number seven ranking to is
my hometown of New York City. In the entire city, I’m only aware of three
public toilets.”
Although he’s been everywhere, Podell named the US as his favourite
country in the world. “We have some of the most spectacular scenery in the
world: the redwoods, Glacier National Park, Mount Rainier, the foliage trails
of New England,” he said. “We are a heterogeneous society. In New York, you can
see people of every race, creed, and colour in the world, all getting along.”
“But if I had to pick countries, I’d go with Nepal and Switzerland for
scenery,” he added. “For food, I would go with Vietnam, Thailand, and France.
For culture I would go with France, England, Spain, and Egypt.”
One of his biggest learnings from all his travels has been that people
around the world are the same. “With the exception of the few truly weird
countries (like North Korea and those in the midst of famine or war) people
around the world are pretty much the same in terms of their love for their
families and children, their desire to be happy, and their hope to live in
peace and have a better life,” he said.
“The main differences I observed were that people in the very poor
countries were far more able to get along on less than citizens of the rich
countries ever could.”
It would have been a shame not to share all his experiences with the
rest of the world, so Albert Podell put all the best moments of his epic
travels into a book called Around the World in 50 Years.
Source: http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/man-spends-50-years-visiting-every-country-in-the-world.html#more-46158
Well that's it for today. Now that we've done the world, where shall we go tomorrow?
See ya, eh!
Bob
